Cultivating Compassion

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 “Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

 

Welcome back to the Cultivating Compassion Toolkit.

We hope that you are finding the Toolkit useful when generating discussion with colleagues on the expression of compassionate care in our everyday working lives. For those new to the site the tool kit was developed through collaborative working between three universities and four partnership health care organisations  in Sussex and Surrey

 A Toolkit is a set of resources that enables people to do their work more effectively. This Cultivating  Compassion Awareness Toolkit is designed to help you enhance compassion in practice by undertaking activities which will support  your ability to respond in everyday care situations in ways that make patients, families and colleagues feel cared for and respected.

For self compassion to thrive Kristen Neff suggests we embrace self kindness, common humanity and mindfulness. Self kindness reduces our self criticism, common humanity reminds us we are not alone in our suffering and mindfulness is about being aware of difficult thoughts without over identifying with them. Many of the tools in this tool kit are designed to trigger discussion about how we nurture our own self compassion and how we extend  compassion to our colleagues in the workplace. The evidence shows us that when we engage in self compassion then our compassion for others follows

We invite you to engage with the different resources and to discuss your response with your colleagues and use the ideas to create resources that work better for you.